Understand
The city was once the eastern terminus of the Maritime Silk Road and home to a large 100,000 by some estimates! international community, mostly Arabs but also including Persians, Indians and others. The English word "satin" comes from "Zaiton", the Arabic name for Quanzhou, the port from which that fabric first reached the West.
Marco Polo sailed home from Quanzhou. He described it as the world's busiest port, with Alexandria second. At about that time, Kublai Khan's fleet for the invasion of Japan sailed from Quanzhou. It was wiped out by a storm, the kami kaze or "spirit wind". This is the origin of the name for kamikaze plots, it was hoped they would save Japan in a similar way.
After the emperor cut off foreign expeditions, destroyed the records and let the great ships rot in the 1420s, Quanzhou declined considerably. Today, it is less well-known than the provincial capital Fuzhou or Special Economic Zone Xiamen, and certainly gets fewer tourists than either. However, it definitely has its own attractions, notably interesting architecture and good shopping.
Like most Chinese cities, Quanzhou has some of the standard ugly 8-storey concrete apartment blocks. However, there are far fewer of those than elsewhere and whole districts are much prettier. The city government has policies that require new buildings to follow certain architectural conventions. Downtown, there are many new 4 to 6 floor buildings with the traditional Chinese tile roofs with points on the corners. Near the old mosque there are new buildings with Islamic themes in the architecture. The rebuilding of the Zhongshan Road shopping area got a UNESCO award for heritage preservation, and Quanzhou got an international award in a contest for most livable cities in 2003, neighboring Xiamen had won the previous year.
